Datamation Staff

InfoWorld: According to Janco’s 2012 IT Salary Survey, the average enterprise IT worker now makes $78,299, a 0.81 percent increase over last year and about the same as IT workers made in January of 2008. For IT pros at mid-size companies, the gains were slightly better–a 1.19 percent increase brings the average salary to $74,435. […]

The Register: Just ahead of CES, Acer has taken the wraps off a new 15mm-thick ultrabook that it says is “the world’s thinnest.” The Aspire S3 is also the first Windows PC with a Thunderbolt port–something Apple includes on its products. The Thunderbolt port, an HDMI and a USB 3.0 port all hide inside a […]

Time: A new survey of likely smartphone buyers holds good news for Apple and Samsung. According to ChangeWave Research, 54 percent of consumers planning to buy a smartphone in the next three months said they would likely pick an iPhone. While that’s down from the September survey when 65 percent of people said they wanted […]

Tom’s Hardware: Linus Torvalds has officially released version 3.2 of the Linux kernel. In the announcement, he wrote, “So we do have a few last-minute reverts and small fixes. Still, there’s not a whole lot of changes since -rc7 (shortlog appended), and almost all of them are *tiny*. So despite the few annoying last-minute reverts, […]

PCMag: Security firm Seculert says that hackers have used the Ramnit worm, a piece of malware that usually targets the financial industry, to steal login credentials for 45,000 Facebook accounts. Most of the data stolen belonged to users in the UK and France. “We suspect that the attackers behind Ramnit are using the stolen credentials […]

Reuters: Samsung Electronics has estimated its fourth quarter profits at 5.2 trillion won ($4.5 billion). That beat analyst expectations of 4.7 trillion won in profits, and it marked a new record high for the company. It’s also a 22 percent improvement over the company’s third quarter numbers. Much of the good news is due to […]

Computerworld: Hackers have publicly exposed source code for two of Symantec’s older enterprise security products: Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 and Symantec Antivirus 10.2. Both products are between four and five years old, and the company says that the code in the current iterations of the software has changed significantly since then. In a statement, the […]

Bloomberg: A study by European firm Arieso has found that iPhone 4S owners use about twice as much data as iPhone 4 owners. That may be because the voice interface prompts users to access data services more often, or it may be because the iPhone 4S syncs with Apple’s servers more often. By comparison, the […]

GigaOm: Apple has wrapped up one of its many ongoing patent lawsuits related to its mobile products. Taiwan’s Elan Microelectronics Corp says it has settled its dispute with the iPhone maker out of court. Although the exact details of the settlement weren’t divulged, Apple will reportedly pay Elan $5 million, and the two companies have […]

ZDNet: Facebook has provided some insight into the number of malicious messages that target its users by revealing that it blocks 200 million malicious actions on its social network every day. Despite those efforts, 4 million Facebook users receive spam messages on any given day, as spam accounts for just under 4 percent of all […]

All Things D: Market research firm Gartner has cut its 2012 growth projections for the global IT industry from 4.6 percent to 3.7 percent. It now forecasts worldwide annual IT spending of $3.8 trillion, or about $1 billion less than its last prediction. The firm also cut its longer-term growth forecasts, predicting 5 percent average […]

Reuters: Despite pressure from governments and business groups, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is pushing ahead with its plan to add more top-level domains. Beginning January 12, the independent organization will begin accepting applications from those who want to enable Internet addresses that end in something other than .com, .net, .org […]